CHAPTER 2
As they walked, Vash studied the long twin shadows that stretched before them, both rather fantastic in nature, augmented by the inorganic shapes of hair and cross, respectively.
"Gonna be a sandstorm tonight," remarked Wolfwood, narrowing his eyes and gazing out at the darkening silhouettes of the dunes. The sky above them looked like a locust plague.
The town was dusty and still as any town at the onset of dusk, a study in various shades of sepia. Now encroaching night was plunging it into muted blue, casting everything in obscurity, like a veil draped over a lamp. It seemed softened, subdued.
As they approached the saloon, Wolfwood lit another cigarette.
"Your teeth are chattering," he observed.
Vash smiled wanly.
"I'm not very resistant-- to temperature."
Wolfwood didn't ask him to elaborate.
"Let's not linger in the bar, then," the priest said, pausing at the doors. "Bound to be chilly down here."
"There's whiskey down here," Vash pointed out.
"I'll get a key and a bottle," Wolfwood countered diplomatically, and disappeared through the swinging doors, which continued their phantom motion for several seconds after he'd gone.
Left alone, Vash leaned against the roughness of the wall, trying to ignore the rapidly falling mercury.
He turned his hands over and stared at his gritty palms. He plucked at the sleeves of his coat, crimson dulled by a layer of powder-fine sand. Everything, all of him, was covered in a dusty mist- every crease in the leather, every crevice of his ankle-length coat. Every part of him uncovered by leather was the same- he could feel it on his neck, coating his face and settled between the upthrust pronts and peaks of his hair.
It wouldn't show so much, he thought. Not against his blondness.
Not like it did on Nicholas. Wolfwood had such dark hair, something beyond plain crow and closer to honest jet, the extent of its blackness only truly evident in the blue luster it gained in certain lights.
It was a compellingly unnatural color that suited him well.
Wolfwood ducked back through the double doors, grinning, disrupting his thoughts, a bottle of deep amber in his grip. He pulled back his hand and tossed Vash the key.
"All squared away, Tongari. Whaddya say?"
"Thanks," managed Vash, through unresponsive lips.
"Don't mention it," the priest said, tucking his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and throwing a companionable arm around him.
They ascended the stairs, and Vash studied his friend's profile in the scant light. Wolfwood had a strong face, an unusual face, and yet it was a face he found hard to hold exactly right in his mind's eye when they were apart.
He assessed the details- his brow, the slightly roman outward curve of his nose, the unexpected fineness of his jaw.
Each piece, taken by itself, was handsome, almost classical. Altogether he was oddly refined in looks and structure, Vash realized, something at an entirely interesting juxtaposition with his rougher attributes.
Wolfwood relieved him of the keys and unlocked the door, easing it past the ramshackle jamb with an expertly measured bump of his shoulder.
"Applied brutality in moderation," remarked Vash, yawning.
Wolfwood's smile flashed in the semi-dark.
"All things in moderation, eh Tongari? That's our modus operandi, you and I."
The room, with its rustic iron double bed, was serviceable; spare but spotless. It was fairly generously sized, however, accommodating a table and two chairs by the window, beaten but sturdy in their construction.
Vash filled the washbasin with water from the cracked white pitcher on the table.
Sighing, he slowly began to rinse his face, plunging his hair beneath the surface and agitating the long pale spikes into a tangled mass.
Wolfwood had relinquished the Cross Punisher, settling it in the far corner of the room, a dormant sentinel quietly looming out of mind.
He fell backwards onto the bed, eliciting a bantam whicker of protest from the weary iron, and now he lay in repose, his long legs sprawled across the faded matelasse coverlet, quietly blowing rings of smoke toward the weathered planks and plaster of the ceiling.
Vash turned around, taking the threadbare hand towel from its tacking nail beside the basin. He bent his head and began to coax the moisture from his hair, dragging the rough cloth over its length.
It was, of course, beyond predictable.
As soon as he began to dry it, his hair embarked on its inevitable ascent, struggling toward uprightness with a force not unlike the indomitable insistence of natural curl, or the unstoppable progress of evolution.
Wolfwood was regarding him from the bed. He was conscious of that grey-dark gaze, its intensity, even at rest.
Vash paused.
"You're over it, aren't you?"
Wolfwood laughed quietly.
"I was over it before you cleared the first dune. Truth be told, Tongari, I never stay mad. Can't afford to."
A pause. "I have enough to carry."
"You seemed pretty angry."
"Flash fury." He shrugged, idly flicking ashes. "Don't last."
Vash glanced up, straggling pieces of obstinate hair falling over his face like the wayward points of a star. All over his head they seemed drawn back to cohesion, to formation. Separating into sections, they draped at half-mast in long graceful arcs, rapidly stiffening in the dry air, drawing up into thick, soft spikes.
"That's one hell of a cow-lick," said Wolfwood.
A ring of smoke outgrew its bounds and broke apart above their heads.
Vash smiled.
"Can't help it," he said.
Reaching inside his coat, he pulled his revolver from its holster, broke it, and laid it on the rickety bedside table.
"Are you still cold?" asked the priest meditatively, studying the patterns of smoke in the lamplight.
"Not so much," replied the gunman. "Heat rises, I guess."
He turned absent attention toward the .45, giving each of the pieces a quick pass with an oil soaked rag, a practiced gesture- minimal, efficacious.
Clouds of vicious sand had begun to roil outside, striking the window in a pinprick war of microcosmic proportions and epic effect. There was no visibility beyond the besieged glass. Even the darkness was imperceptible.
"What now?" asked Vash.
Wolfwood reached down over the edge of the bed and brandished the bottle of whiskey for his benefit.
Vash grinned, pulling a deck of cards from his pocket.
"Twenty-one?"
Wolfwood nodded, motioning for Vash to join him.
He sat up and reached into his jacket, letting a handful of bullets clatter and muffle against the plainness of the bedspread.
Vash took the clips from his guns and emptied them onto the mattress before sitting down, his back against the iron rails of the footboard.
They played for bullets, and not double-dollars, because money was a bad business among friends, according to Wolfwood-- who spoke as if he knew-
Still-
Sagacity aside, the inferences of the statement were not lost on Vash.
The priest clamped down on his cigarette, shuffling the deck and setting it down on the bed in front of Vash, handing him the bottle.
Vash cut, and drank, watching as Wolfwood shuffled again.
"Want to deal?" he asked.
Vash shook his head.
"It's all yours, friend."
It was an odd armistice that settled over them, calm and reclined, Wolfwood smoking without any particular urgency, Vash slumped across from him with a slight smile as he waited for the next turn of his hand.
The old tin lantern cast a sulky ring of tangerine-blue outward from the table, fading ever to black toward the sloping corners of the room, shunning acquaintance with all things that lay outside the circle of its influence.
"Ante up," drawled Wolfwood.
Bullets were tossed into the space between them.
Wolfwood sighed, tipping the bottle back against his lips.
"Ah," he said, "--a libation, to the patron saint of tiny luxuries."
"You said it," Vash agreed, contemplating the hand the priest had dealt him.
A jack, a seven.
"Stand," he said, frowning.
"Conservative," commented the priest.
Wolfwood flipped his down card. It made for a pair of eights. Not enough. He hit himself again. A six. Fuck.
"Twenty-two," he muttered. "Busted."
Vash smiled.
"Never hit a hard seventeen," he said, raking in the pot.
"Whatever," Wolfwood said, but the corner of his mouth smiled. "Ante up."
Vash swallowed a long drink of liquor, relishing the burn in his throat. It seared away sand and dryness in a flash of blissful warmth.
"House could have twenty-one," Wolfwood said, looking at his face card, the ace of diamonds. "Do you want insurance?"
"Would it do me any good if you did?" Vash shrugged. "I doubt it."
"Suit yourself," said Wolfwood, adeptly turning over his second card. A king.
"Hey, Blackjack!" he crowed, grinning.
"Deal," Vash said, shaking his head.
They played out the hands in companionable quiet, speaking only of matters relating to the cards, and Vash felt inexplicably content.
Better yet, he was winning.
"Charmed game," he said.
"Charmed life," the priest remarked, wryly, as he prepared to deal again.
The cards fell like a challenge.
Vash's eyes followed their descent, assessing.
"Hit," he said, eyeing the ace and six that lay upturned before him.
Twenty-one.
"Player wins," sighed Wolfwood. "House pays."
"Always hit a soft seventeen," Vash said, happily.
"You and your rules, Tongari."
"It's common sense."
Wolfwood grinned.
"That may be. I call it playing it safe."
"It's obviously working well enough," countered Vash, indicating his small mountain of rounds.
"For now."
"Now is where we live, Friend."
Wolfwood met his gaze.
"What I'm saying is, no matter how well you play, the House always comes out ahead."
Vash felt a chill that he knew Wolfwood had not intended his words to evoke when he said them, but there it was, hanging between them, and now his eyes registered that he felt it too.
Vash drew a breath.
"That's fatalist," he said, coolly, reaching for the bottle of whiskey.
"It's a fact." Wolfwood's tone was bloodless.
Vash wondered what the topic actually was. He felt as if he should know. As if they both should know.
But the subject just didn't exist yet.
"I guess there's nothing the player can do then."
"He can quit while he's ahead."
Vash laughed sharply.
He flipped several bullets into the center, raising his bets.
"One should always follow a streak of luck," he said. "According to the odds."
"Luck runs out, Tongari."
"Does it."
"Sometimes…" Wolfwood paused. "Sometimes you need to risk to win. Even if it goes against your philosophy."
The priest looked up, his voice low.
"You need to hit the hard numbers."
Vash stared at him.
"Are you the House, Wolfwood?"
"I'm just a dealer."
Vash nodded, never moving his eyes.
He pushed his entire pile of bullets forward.
"Then deal," he said, deliberately.
Wolfwood shrugged, resorting the deck, which he presented.
Vash cut it in his hand.
He dealt.
Two tens for Vash the Stampede.
Another ace for him.
"Do you want insurance?"
"No insurance."
Vash's eyes were wide and violently green, fixed on Wolfwood with a purpose he could not define.
"Hit me," he said.
"That's suicide," Wolfwood said, startled. "You can't hit twenty."
"That's a risk I'm willing to take."
"It's a stupid risk."
"Risk to win, you said. You wanted me to hit the hard numbers, right Churchman? Well they don't get any harder than that."
His gaze was seething in a way that gave the priest pause.
Wolfwood leaned back, slowly.
"Fine," he said. "A hit it is."
He spun the card down abruptly, the sharpness of the gesture revealing his upset.
And Vash smiled.
"Hey!" he said. "Look at that."
Wolfwood could scarcely believe it.
"How did you pull an ace?" he asked thickly.
"Who knows?"
Vash shook his head, grinning. His sudden anger had dissipated like a flock of startled doves at the sight of the salvation card.
"Who cares? I broke the House."
"And I lost," Wolfwood said quietly.
There was a moment of silent horror, then, a sudden intrusive darkness that seemed entirely displaced, for the moment, for the circumstances.
Vash swallowed.
"I don't want to play anymore."
Wolfwood nodded, suddenly reticent.
Outside the sandstorm redoubled, blasting blindly at the walls.